Modern American Poetry

(^382) Louis L. Martz
orbit and the shark-jaws
of outer circumstance
will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving,
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.
This is only a beginning. From here she moves out to remember the
meaning of “Mercury, Hermes, Thoth,” inventors and patrons of the Word.
And then, “when the shingles hissed / in the rain of incendiary,” a voice
speaks louder than the “whirr and roar in the high air” (CP,520), and she has
her vision and dream where “Ra, Osiris, Amenappeared / in a spacious, bare
meetinghouse”—in Philadelphia or in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania:
yet he was not out of place
but perfectly at home
in that eighteenth-century
simplicity and grace ... (CP,523)
As in Freud’s study, all religions are blending into one in her mind, though
critics, she knows, will complain that “Depth of the sub-conscious spews
forth / too many incongruent monsters” (CP,534). Nevertheless, through
wordplay and all her other poetic devices, like them or not, her aim is to
recover the secret of Isis,
which is: there was One
in the beginning, Creator,
Fosterer, Begetter, the Same-forever
in the papyrus-swamp
in the Judean meadow. (CP,541)